Individuals and collaborators of educational institutions, firms, joint ventures, and other organizations often compose, view, and edit documents using document authoring tools, such as word processors or desktop publishing software. When such individuals or collaborators revise or otherwise produce different versions of a document, they often use conventional document authoring tools that lack effective features for comparing different document versions. Such conventional document authoring tools make it cumbersome for individuals to review changes between an initial version and a final version of a document or (even more cumbersome) review changes among several versions of a document.
As individuals and collaborators increasing rely on document authoring tools to compare and review changes to documents, some document authoring tools have incorporated features that identify changes among different versions of a document. For example, some conventional document authoring tools identify textual changes between document versions. But many existing authoring tools do so with a list or representation of textual changes shown in a fixed format. For example, regardless of the type of change—whether a capitalization of a letter or a deletion of an entire sentence—some conventional document authoring tools represent each change (or many different types of changes) using the same label or the same markings for revisions, such as strikethrough and underline fonts for deletions and insertions. Such inflexible representation of revisions can increase an individual's review time by requiring line-by-line comparison of documents or review of every marked-up revision within a marked-up document.
In addition to fixed formats, some conventional document authoring tools fail to identify minor or slight changes to a sentence or paragraph. In some cases, conventional document authoring tools fail to identify a word change or an insertion of a punctuation mark within a sentence or paragraph and instead identify such changes as deletions or insertions of a sentence or paragraph. By failing to detect such minor changes, conventional authoring tools misrepresent textual changes as inserted sentences or paragraphs. Such inaccurate detection can complicate an individual's or collaborator's comparison of documents by identifying and reviewing sentences and paragraphs that incorrectly identify changes.